Long-Term Monitoring and Analysis of a Curved Concrete Box-Girder Bridge

Curved bridges are important components of a highway transportation network for connecting local roads and highways, but very few data have been collected in terms of their field performance. This paper presents two-years monitoring and system identification results of a curved concrete box-girder bridge, the West St. On-Ramp, under ambient traffic excitations. The authors permanently installed accelerometers on the bridge from the beginning of the bridge life. From the ambient vibration data sets collected over the two years, the element stiffness correction factors for the columns, the girder, and boundary springs were identified using the back-propagation neural network. The results showed that the element stiffness values were nearly 10% different from the initial design values. It was also observed that the traffic conditions heavily influence the dynamic characteristics of this curved bridge. Furthermore, a probability distribution model of the element stiffness was established for long-term monitoring and analysis of the bridge stiffness change.